Cloud hosting provider ProfitBricks announced on Monday that its “next generation cloud” infrastructure as a service offering is generally available in North America, touting test results that demonstrate significantly faster performance than Rackspace and Amazon, and promising several important design improvements in comparison to those cloud hosting competitors.

The cloud hosting services are available from the ProfitBricks website, with the company also offering new users a 14-day free trial.

The press release cites UnixBench score 227 percent greater than Amazon AWS and 194 percent faster I/O than Rackspace. The full results (and full methodology) for the performance testing is available at the CloudSpectator website. CloudSpectator was commissioned by ProfitBricks to performance test its services specifically against Amazon and Rackspace.

The release also quotes IDC analyst Melanie Posey, who says the end-user adoption in the IaaS cloud space is going to be determined by price and performance in the next five years, but new entrants to the market too often imitate the existing solutions.

ProfitBricks is an interesting cloud case partly because, like Rackspace and unlike Amazon, it has its roots in the traditional web hosting business, which has more of a history of hands-on customer service relationships, along with other distinct characteristics.

Started by Achim Weiss and Andreas Gauger, the two founders of the German-based mass-market hosting giant 1&1 Internet (now a part of United Internet, which has a stake in the new venture) ProfitBricks was engineered to solve what the Weiss and Gauger saw as the limitations of current-gen cloud offerings – often built on legacy server architectures – specifically in the areas of scalability and performance, delivering on some of the unmet promises of cloud infrastructure.

At HostingCon in August, Achim Weiss and US CEO Robert Rizika spoke to WHIR TV about some of the design philosophy and engineering that underpin ProfitBricks’ next generation cloud, as well as some of the company history. (Watch the video here: VIDEO: ProfitBricks CEOs Describe the Next Generation Cloud).

In the interview with the WHIR, Weiss says the product was engineered over the last two years by more than 50 developers, and has been available in Germany since late last year. The product launches this week in the US as the conclusion of a beta process that has been underway for several months, as well as a US hiring process that included the appointment of US CEO Robert Rizika. In August, ProfitBricks appointed William Toll and Clint Miller – both veterans of the hosting business – to VP positions in the US.

The key features of the next generation cloud service, says Weiss, include live vertical scaling and by-the-minute pricing, meaning customers don’t need to preselect server sizes, leave resources unused or rewrite to scale. Instances can automatically adjust from 1 to 48 CPU cores and from 1 GB to 196 GB of RAM. The pricing model charges customers only for the resources they have used, and is based on four parameters, with no fees for things customers can’t measure directly themselves (such as I/O access)..

Among the service’s selling points is a graphical user interface that enables customers to treat the ProfitBricks cloud infrastructure as a “virtual data center,” designing network architecture through drag and drop Visio-style graphical tools, and then creating that virtual architecture through a simple click-of-a-button process.

Weiss also says the service is built on an infrastructure that uses virtualized InfiniBand technology to deliver network performance and choice that compares with their local networks. The company doesn’t charge for back-end network connection, so customers can design their architecture however they choose.

“We deconstructed cloud infrastructure down to its most basic elements and discovered there was a far better way to deliver the service,” says Weiss, quoted in the press release. “We ended up reinventing the architecture, which allows us to offer substantially better performance and a new level of flexibility in cloud infrastructure. Our platform allows ProfitBricks to offer unprecedented services at prices others cannot touch because of legacy design and built-in costs.”

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